Category: Recipe Reviews

As may be evident by my recent posts, I’ve baked hardly a thing this summer. It’s been lovely and blissful, in its own way, to not turn the oven on. Instead I’ve thrown all that energy I would for baking into making ice cream and other frozen treats. (I have one more frozen treat recipe to share, for now.) One of the last things I baked before the summer heat settled in was Shirley’s perfect pound cake.

It’s a tall order to call something perfect and this pound cake is just so. In a chat on Twitter that I had with Shirley the first time I made her recipe, she told me that one of her readers had used it to make a birthday cake. So not only is it a perfect pound cake, but also perfect for all occasions as it is flexible. Like many gluten-free folks, Shirley uses a custom-made, gluten-free flour blend. I’ve yet to use a gluten-free flour blend – whether one made from scratch with someone’s recipe or my own, or store-bought – so I converted the amount with an equal ratio of cornstarch and brown rice flour (the only kind of rice flour I had on hand at the time), based on Shirley’s flour blend, and it worked really well.

Every time I’ve made it, the pound cake has been finished within one or two days (usually only making it to the second day if I’ve saved some and hidden it away).

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I love French onion soup, but have never made it myself. (In fact, I’m not even sure if I have had French onion soup…maybe I just love the idea of it?) This is partly because I have never seen a recipe for it that doesn’t use wine. Before, when I was underage, I didn’t want to cook with alcohol or want to eat anything made with alcohol, even if the alcohol was cooked out and all that was left was the flavour. I think I had some sort of fear that I’d get drunk.

Well, I haven’t made the inaugural French onion soup yet but I have gotten closer with making these French onion soup sandwiches from Joy the Baker, which she made from Portuguese Girl Cooks (new-to-me blog that I am now enjoying browsing). It’s my favourite sandwich of the moment and it kind of reminds me of onion pizza. There’s no wine involved (I used the beef broth option) and they are seriously good. SO GOOD, as Sophia Grace would say on Ellen.

I’d never cooked down onions before but now that I have, they are being kept on the menu. Carmelized onions, onion jam (whatever you want to call it) is extremely versatile and we’ve already put it to different uses besides this sandwich. (I’ve already made more, cooked in bacon fat leftover from frying bacon.) Plus it’s easy to do, with hardly any effort involved. I can’t promise there won’t be tears, though. (Ha!)